Journey to Spirituality, Healing and Awakening

A few weeks ago, the market was all abuzz with the announcement of Google +1.

Danny Sullivan wrote a customarily thorough article about Google +1 in this SearchEngineLand post:

The idea makes a lot of sense. If you’re searching, it’s nice to see if there are any answers that are recommended by your friends. Indeed, it makes so much sense that Google’s already been kind of offering this already through Google Social Search for nearly two years. But now these explicit recommendations become part of that.

Further in the article, Danny Sullivan talks about an aspect of Google +1 that is of great interest to me:

Social search signals, including the new +1 recommendations, will also continue to influence the first two things below plus power the new, third option:

Influence the ranking of results, causing you to see things others might not, based on your social connections

Influence the look of results, showing names of those in your social network who created, shared or now recommend a link

Influence the look of results, showing an aggregate number of +1s from all people, not just your social network, for some links

Zakta.com, a personal and social search engine created by my startup Zakta (released in 2009) was based on three core ideas, parts of which overlap with what Google is now doing:

Allow users to control their own search results (through Zakta Personal Web Search)

Allow users to organize their informational search results and share them back with the search community (through Zakta Guides)

Incorporate social signals from the user’s trust network and also in aggregate from the user community at large to improve search result ranking for everyone

It is heartening to see key elements of Zakta’s direction (particularly related to social signals from #3 above) from 2+ years ago be embodied in the world’s largest search engine today!

At their scale, Google has both problems and opportunities with their Google +1 direction. The opportunities are quite evident:

Boosting their sagging (and broken / manipulated) Pagerank with social signals. To their credit, Google has been quite aggressively doing this for over 2 years.

Apply this same +1 methodology to ads, and gain more social signals around ad relevance as well

The problems with this for Google at their scale include:

Manipulation of social signals – would it be that far behind before the SEO community figure out how to manipulate the signals derived from +1?

How to prevent Web search result ranking from becoming a mere social popularity contest?

Much has already written about Google +1 by others. I’ve had a set of questions in this regard, which have been answered quite nicely by others:

How might Google use +1 data for search result ranking? In this post How Google Plus One Works For Ranking, Ruud Hein writes probes the question of how Google Plus One data might affect search result ranking. “Is there a correlation between relevance and social shares? Traffic and social shares? Are social shares maybe only relevant and correlated within one’s social network; you visit what I visit but outside of our relationship people could care less? Do pages with more links get equally more social shares? Are too many social shares a sign of web spam?“

Can Google +1 be really competitive to Facebook’s Like? In this post Can Google’s Plus One Take On The Facebook Like?, Nick O’Neill writes: “With Google’s major influence, there’s no doubt that they will be able to get any online publication on the phone in a heartbeat. The only question now is how fast the search company can move. With no add-on for publishers available yet, it’s clear that Google has a long way to go before they put a serious dent in the massive lead that Facebook already has when it comes to measuring consumers’ interest in content around the web.“

Can Google +1 Button succeed, given the lack of success from Google’s previous social solutions? In this post Google +1 Button – 5 Questions Surrounding Its Potential Success, Chris Crum at WebProNews summarizes the success potential for the +1 button as follows: “Facebook’s “like” button works because of Facebook’s social nature. Google’s nature is largely search. Google has also been careful to position the button as heavily search-oriented. Probably the biggest question of them all is: Do people care about interacting with search like they care about interacting with their friends?“

Does Google finally “get” social? In this post, Google +1 Button, Phil Bradley is very critical of Google’s +1 Button. Citing problems with everything from the name of this feature to the fuzziness of who exactly is the social network that your +1’ing influences. “I’ve said it plenty of times before, and I’m saying it again. Google doesn’t understand social. They have absolutely no clue as to how it works, how to use it, or how to work with it. If Google has a downfall at any time in the future, this is what’s going to cause it. Orkut, Google Wave, Google Buzz, and now this latest mess.“

All said and done, Google has demonstrated that they consider social signals as an important element of their ranking of search results. So, does the Google +1 launch officially make Google a social search engine? What do you think?